The individual changes made sense. The system they created no longer did.
A global terminal and logistics company with operations in Houston and strong organizational ties to Rotterdam had spent years adapting roles, workflows, technology, and communication practices to meet immediate needs. Over time, those individually reasonable changes began to work against one another. People were working hard, but cross-functional alignment across the end-to-end customer process had gradually eroded.
The leadership challenge was not simply to improve customer service. It was to see the entire system again and determine how the pieces needed to work together.
What Looked Settled
The company already had experienced employees, an established customer service organization, defined operational functions, and SAP as its enterprise system of record. Leadership also knew where it wanted to go: away from a largely transactional order-entry model and toward a more personalized, managed customer experience.
On the surface, this looked like a process-improvement assignment. It was more complicated than that.
What Remained Unresolved
The problem was not one broken process or one poorly performing team. Years of incremental changes had altered how the work actually moved across the organization.
- Customer Service was carrying an unsustainable workload and operating in an environment that frequently required 24/7 availability.
- Roles and responsibilities across Customer Service, Planning, Operations, Sales and invoicing had become blurred.
- One-to-one communications and workarounds sat outside the formal process, creating dependence on individual and institutional knowledge.
- Operations data was frequently incomplete or inaccurate, limiting real-time visibility for both employees and customers.
- Workflow changes had sometimes been made locally without understanding their consequences elsewhere in the order-to-cash process.
- Existing SAP workflow capabilities were not always being used as designed.
- Customer complaints were increasing around communication, visibility and service.
- There was concern that ancillary services were not always being captured and invoiced.
The organization did not have a people problem, a process problem or a technology problem in isolation. It had an alignment problem across all three.
What Hive Partners Surfaced
Hive Partners began by listening. We conducted 31 individual interviews across executive leadership, Customer Service, Planning, Operations, Commercial, Finance, IT, Engineering, QHSE and customers. The goal was to understand not simply how the process was supposed to work, but how people were actually experiencing it and where the friction occurred.
We then mapped the current order-to-invoice process across truck, rail, marine and pipeline activity and designed corresponding future-state workflows. The comparison made something important visible: local changes made over time had created additional handoffs, unclear ownership, and dependencies that were difficult to see when each function looked only at its own portion of the work.
The work also challenged an important assumption. Improving customer service did not mean asking Customer Service to do more. It meant allowing Customer Service to own the customer while removing work that belonged elsewhere.
What Leadership Had to Decide
The recommendation established much clearer operating boundaries.
Customer Service would become the primary owner of the customer relationship. Planners would own scheduling and communication with carriers. Operations would focus on operating. New order-intake support would handle transaction creation, while operations data support would improve the completeness and timeliness of information flowing into SAP. Distinct checkpoints for Order Intake OK and Planning OK would make accountability explicit rather than assumed.
The redesigned process also called for operational data to be validated and entered into SAP within 24 hours of order fulfillment, helping Customer Service answer questions with more current information while improving the capture of ancillary services that could otherwise be missed in billing.
This was not simply a new process map. It was a decision about who owned what.
What Changed Afterwards
Leadership received an integrated view of a problem that had previously been experienced function by function. Instead of treating customer complaints, employee workload, incomplete data, manual processes, unclear roles and technology limitations as separate issues, the recommendation showed how they were connected.
The work provided leadership with a future-state operating model, defined responsibilities and a practical sequence of changes that could be implemented over time. Just as important, it created a shared language for leaders in Houston and their counterparts abroad to discuss the same operating system rather than a collection of local problems.
Immediate Decision Outputs
The engagement produced:
- Current-state and future-state process maps across truck, rail, marine and pipeline activity.
- Clearer swim lanes across Customer Service, Planning, Operations and order intake.
- Updated role definitions and job responsibilities.
- A formalized customer onboarding approach.
- A governance process for prioritizing SAP changes between Houston and Rotterdam.
- Recommendations for management dashboards and KPIs.
- An operating scorecard.
- A longer-term roadmap for handheld data capture, CRM integration and customer self-service.
The analysis also demonstrated that some apparent cost increases looked different when viewed across the entire system. For example, the projected cost of dedicated order-intake positions was roughly equivalent to the customer-service overtime already being incurred, while freeing higher-value employees to focus on managing the customer rather than transaction entry.
Perspective
Organizations rarely wake up one morning with a completely broken operating model. Drift happens differently. A process changes to solve a legitimate problem. Another team creates a workaround. A responsibility moves. A technology limitation leads to a manual step. Someone fills a gap because the customer needs an answer. Each decision may make sense locally.
Eventually, the organization discovers that all of those reasonable decisions no longer work together. That is when leadership needs more than another process fix. It needs to step back far enough to see where ownership, information, decisions, and accountability have gradually separated.
Sometimes alignment is not lost in one big decision. It is lost one small decision at a time.
Pressure-Test a Live Decision
If a process in your organization has evolved for years, ask a harder question than whether it is working:
If we designed this today, knowing what we know now, would we still assign the work, decisions, and accountability this way?
If the answer is no, the issue may not be the people executing the process. The system around them may have drifted out of alignment.
